


Settled/Unsettled

by jm_serendipitous



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: Aftermath, F/M, Post-Canon, discussion of real people, monster of a one-shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 15:43:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5096159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jm_serendipitous/pseuds/jm_serendipitous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She settles in Texas.</p><p>Hot enough, small enough, and a day's drive from Reggie, she can't part from the border.</p><p>(From him.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Settled/Unsettled

**Author's Note:**

> After seeing Sicario a few times I began obsessively watching cast and crew interviews (my favorite being from Cannes in May where Benicio and Emily spent most of the panel kicking each other under the table and sharing a water bottle), and in Benicio's interview with Vice he said something that summarizes Alejandro (and his relationship with Kate) to a tee.
> 
> He said, "What he protects is what he might take down, too, if it gets in the way of his objective." So that helped influence this story. I was already halfway through when I heard it, but it definitely shaped some things and inspired the sequel that I have no idea if I'll ever write.

“Please sign it.”

“Kate—”

“Please. Sign it.”

 

“You’re coming back, right?”

This is why she didn’t tell Reggie.

Kate Macer hurdles the question, hurls herself from the Suburban before it lulls to a stop mid-round into a parking slot. The pavement slips out from under her, but she has a hand on the door and her mind shouting jump, jump. 

She’s getting better at that, the jumping. It’s jump or get shoved, she’s discovered.

Reggie Wayne yells the question at her back, the same incessant question that’s gotten louder each time, louder and frantic and realizing, and Kate wishes she didn’t feel so guilty about it. Wants not to be. Tries so damn hard not to be. 

The damn thing blooms in her chest anyway. And it’s why she didn’t tell him, Reggie, until after Jennings scribbled his signature beside hers on a transfer slip. Until after he couldn’t talk her out of it and she couldn’t take it back. Until after it was done. 

Since Juarez their friendship has lived in those afters, in those moments when it’s better he doesn’t know just yet. Or at all. In the same moments she swears she actually understands Matt and Alejandro.

Reggie catches up to her, snags her by the wrist. “Kate, you’re coming back right?” 

They’re standing in the middle of a parking lot, her apartment balcony creeping over her shoulder, and the answer still isn’t in Kate’s throat. She pushes the real one down and the one he wants can’t squeeze around it. He wants to pretend Phoenix and the tunnels and the worlds they were blasted into didn’t happen. 

How does she tell him she can’t pretend? That her eyes are too big now? That death has a face she still sees and knows her name by heart? 

They don’t make wolves clothing for sheep.

She halfheartedly pulls on her wrist, and Reggie lets go. Stuffs his hands in his pockets and falls back and away on his heels. “Fine,” he acquiesces over his shoulder. He yanks the driver’s-side door open and he’s inside and no, no, this isn’t what she wanted. “I’ll move too. Where are we going?”

Kate sighs around his name. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying.” 

“We’re a team, Kate. We’re partners,” Reggie says. Like she doesn’t remember. Like it didn’t almost stop her, didn’t almost convince her to fold up the paper and cram it into the glove box, out of sight, out of mind, she doesn’t need to uproot her whole existence because of one man. 

“I need time,” Kate admits, and it’s the closest she can get to the truth right now. The truth that isn’t how said paper sat in her glove box for a week before she got it in the door. How that one man was right, goddamn him.

She leans on the door, crossing her arms and bracing her shoulder and resting her head on the window getting colder behind the setting sun. “It’s just a sabbatical, all right?” 

The leather seat squeaks as Reggie shifts. He crunches his boots on the step. “Where are you going? And how long is this sabbatical?”

Kate shrugs, confesses too, “Camp Bullis is looking for instructors. The first class starts January fouth.” 

“It’s not gonna last,” Reggie speculates.

“I have to try.” Kate groans, tears her nails down her face and neck and into her hair and they get too tangled to move anymore. “I’m not right in the head, Reggie. I can’t come back until I am. If I can come back.”

It’s an easy enough excuse. And closer to the truth than earlier. But Reggie sees past her bullshit, and she loves him for it most of the time. 

Most of the time. 

His eyes queer and his brow furrows and his head goes to the side in such a tilt that Kate can feel her own world canting on its axis. And she wishes he saw the screen, just this once. Wishes he’d smack his nose into it and accept its face value.

He’s never been very good at it.

“What the hell happened in that tunnel?”

 

Alejandro’s what happened. 

She followed the wrong man down the wrong tunnel, and she still hasn’t found her way back.

 

She settles in Texas.

Hot enough, small enough, and a day’s drive from Reggie, she can’t part from the border.

(From him.)

 

Lucky her, he follows her there, too. 

 

He never disappeared completely, the ghost of Alejandro, Alejandro the ghost. Five months later, and he’s still there in the corner of her eye: tapping the steering wheel two lanes over, crunching a nacho basket on the bench across the street, swinging a basket down the next aisle in the grocery store, nursing a glass of whiskey in the back booth of whatever bar.

She should’ve reported it to begin with – to Reggie, to Jennings, to her new superiors now – but she never quite could. Can. Like her hand never reaches for the gun. Because he never warrants it. He doesn’t approach her or talk to her or let her catch him looking. He never invades her house by slipping the lock or scaling the balcony she only used from inside after. 

They’d laugh at her if she did, anyway, her colleagues, and their laughter would trickle down to her trainees and she doesn’t need that here. She doesn’t need laughing in her face and behind her back, or for anyone to hold onto it like high school bullies carried over from middle school. 

She keeps quiet about it, and maybe not telling is okay. Maybe that’s better.

Why not keep him wholly to herself? 

Alejandro Gillick happened to her. No changing or sweeping it under the rug because a man like that only vanishes when he wants to.

 

She cuts off any questions her CST trainees have. If they hear the others taunting her for being spooked by a faceless shadow, if their questions are flashlights they try to disinter her face and the figure looming behind her, in the past, always her present, she shuts it down before she hears the click.

But she likes them. 

For the most part.

They celebrate any small accomplishment like they’ve won the brightest gold star in the galaxy, and Kate bites her cheek until copper coats her teeth to keep so much to herself. 

A boy named Marlon, fresh from a shelf of high school all-American trophies, fatally shoots a person cut-out between the eyes on his first try, and it’s in her chest to say it doesn’t feel like such a victory when cardboard has blood and veins and breath.

This girl called Beth – “Like the KISS song” – flips a man twice her size over her shoulder, and Kate thinks good, you’ll need it. Some enemies and all their betrayals come from behind you, where you can’t see them and you don’t expect it. 

They don’t know how bad it can get. They’re innocent and unsullied and small, and Kate bites her cheek and tongue and lip. She’s not a soldier, but she can train these kids to be. Each of them has to be strong and tall and sturdy and a goddamn pillar to not be blown over by what they’ve volunteered for.

 

All the while, she rebuilds her own pillar.

 

Valentine’s Day, and the compound is quiet for a change, recruits snuck out and at the dive bar twenty minutes down the road. Kate uses the silence to write down everything as she remembers it, nothing behind bars, all limbs lost and bullets flown.

(Build.)

Easter, and she finds a painted egg that jingles when she shakes it outside her door. She tosses it without cracking the seal and knocks down the bricks of her insides. They’re riddled anyway, pierced jaggedly through. 

(Build.)

Mother’s Day, and she talks to her mom as she shops. Concern leaks in from the other end, but the first chirp of freedom loosens her chest, raises a hand to wave at Alejandro as he leaves a cashier line. It feels so damn good to breathe. 

(Build.)

Memorial Day, and the blast, pop, boom of the fireworks don’t make her flinch. Reggie’s visiting her for the weekend, and next to him, a marvel of colors splashing their faces, she thinks, yes, it’s time. Dropping him at the hotel later than she’d ever dare to be out, she grouts granite around the steel core that rights her spine.

 

Reggie was right; it doesn’t last.

The bell tolls, ferocious and vibrant, five months gone, first batch of recruits graduated and the compound too quiet. It pangs into her chest at two-something in the morning, somewhere in wondering who popped the stars in her eyes, and suddenly her fingers itch for gilded Phoenix dust and dripping Arizona sunsets as the moon itches to get through the drawn shade. 

She thought she’d find the glimmer in the muck, but the emplacement is fool’s gold: a glamour that set sail on a fool’s errand and tows her home with nothing to show for it. 

 

Alejandro isn’t there anymore. 

 

Somehow, that makes it too quiet, too easy. 

The dark corners don’t have eyes and there aren’t faces pressed to her windows. Alejandro vanishes like she never thought he would, and for some reason it unsettles her. That he’s gone, that she doesn’t know where he went or why he went or if he’ll come back or when.

He’s lived a year in her veins, and maybe that’s why it unsettles her, why she’s disappointed he’s gone. She trips on that year accidentally, striking the match and catching the fuse as she storms a man’s Flagstaff residence. The spark sizzles up the string and up the string then boom. The bomb explodes through the basement door, and a girl too young at six to be screaming that hard huddles under the stairs.

She doesn’t realize how much shrapnel there is under her feet until later, snot stiffening her shirt and returning the girl to her mother, thirty-six hours of tears paved down their cheeks. 

Case report swinging at her side, the folder scrapes her leg as she approaches Jennings’ office. Phones trill on every desk, in every pocket and jacket, and there’s so much noise in the relay race of information bouncing from phone to computer to folder, but still she hears it. Still Kate snatches bits of conversation between Jennings and the man pacing his office. 

Colombia and cartel and ops drill through the glass walls. Alejandro and Medellín and agent drill into her, prodding her steel spine as if it’s a weak point she’ll crumble under. 

As much as she wants to force intrusion, she knocks politely. As much as she wants to charge in, she waits to be beckoned. Jennings’ gaze darts between her and the man blocking out the sun like a scudding cloud obstinate to move on. 

He clears his throat and though her presence is despite protocol and she should be booted immediately, commences introductions. “Macer, this is Sergeant Major Christopher Leech of Special Activities. Mr. Leech, this is Kate Macer, an agent with our Special Weapons and Tactics team and Mr. Wayne’s partner.”

Another SOG agent like Matt. Of course. He grins at Kate, and she crosses her arms over her chest, just barely musters a quirk in return. “You want Reggie for an op?” 

“We’re interested,” Leech confesses. “Your partner’s IRR, is he not?” 

One tour overseas, eighteen months with her before she abandoned him for some soul search and mental regeneration. Kate begrudgingly confirms Reggie’s status, then looks to Jennings. “Sir, if I may?” she hedges, cutting a glance at Leech. “Reggie doesn’t have any experience with cartels, nonetheless Colombia ones—”

“You were eavesdropping, Ms. Macer?” 

Leech’s last name fits him as snugly as a sweater, Kate decides, wonders if his mother had a premonition of him in this moment. He tilts his head, light bouncing off his sheared head, and crosses his arms too, gold Rolex slipping and sliding on his arm. Unclasped to his wrist, Kate’s surprised it hasn’t fallen right off.

She tacks on a smile all the same. “The walls are thin here, sir.” 

“You say Mr. Wayne doesn’t have cartel experience, but you think you do,” Leech hunts, “even though you’re partners. Correct?” 

Jennings eases into the chair behind his desk, pushes into the back and laces his fingers together. The hinges squeak under the pressure. “Kate worked with Delta Force on an exfil a year ago,” he informs Leech. 

“We were sent in to retrieve a man named Guillermo Díaz, brother of Manuel Díaz, from prison for questioning. Do those names sound familiar?”

“Sonora cartel, yeah, I know the names. I also know Manuel and his cousin, Fausto Alarcón, are no longer with us. Neither are Alarcón’s wife and sons, or anyone he employed as security in his home. Sonora was leaderless for months, prompting turf and goods wars. Other cartels negotiated for its power,” Leech explains, jaw set. “Which is precisely what the mission I’m pulling a team together is about.” 

“Who won the highest bid?” Kate asks, brow furrowing. Fourteen known cartels operate in Latin America, eight in Colombia alone not counting the five dissolved actors. The list of suspects who would’ve traded any sum for so much power is too long.

“Thankfully, Los Rastrojos,” Leech sighs.

Kate sputters. “’Thankfully’? Los Rastrojos inherited power from the Cali Cartel, who dismantled Pablo Escobar’s cocaine trade in the nineties.”

“And it looks like they’re at it again,” Leech reports. “Agents within ISA informed me an Apalachian Meeting between Los Rastrojos and Los Urabeños is scheduled to take place in Cali next Tuesday.”

“Christ,” Kate breathes, lets out a curse in quick succession and a brick on her heart moves. Not even Sisyphus could’ve moved it before, sunk deep in the mud of last year’s hurricane. Alejandro’s name is still chipped in its red. “But they’re rivals.” 

Leech shrugs. “Los Rastrojos has been systematically subsuming control of every small cartel in Colombia since Alarcón’s death. The power of each individual cartel stays with their capos, but those capos are under Los Rastrojos’ umbrella and thus answer to them. If they and Los Urabeños combine forces, well, it’ll be one big happy family.”

Isn’t that what Matt wanted? Wanted from Alejandro? Isn’t that why the government contracted him and pardoned the bullets shot from his suppressor? In an unwinnable war you bet on the lesser of two evils, and their government did that – does that. To bring Matt’s order into fruition they turn a blind eye to the birth of a super cell. 

Restore power to the right person and they restore order.

What Matt said all along.

“You said Tuesday?” Leech nods. Three days, Kate muses. Enough time, she gathers. To weasel her way in on Leech’s operation and convince Reggie it’s fine, she’s fine, she can handle it. It’s enough time to become Alejandro’s hunter. The brick edges a little more. “I want in.” 

Leech pockets his hands and rocks on his heels as he marinates her request. He is steadfastly Kate’s least favorite person. “Who from Delta Force recruited you?”

“Matt Graver, sir,” Kate answers.

“I know Matt,” he says, nodding at the floor and its carpet the shade of his sport’s jacket, uncomplete without a tie. “I’ll ask on you and let you know. But don’t hold your breath, Agent Macer. Surviving a retrieval mission isn’t the same as what I’m asking.” 

 

Matt comes through for once. 

Kate’s seated on the plane to Marco Fidel Suárez Air Base Monday night. 

 

(She still can’t sleep on planes.)

 

All inter-agency missions are the same. While everyone subscribes to protecting the same homeland, the barbs between divisions can be as nasty as politicians appraising one another at the podium. Delta sticks with their comrades in Delta, DEVGRU with DEVGRU, MARSOC with MARSOC.

Outsiders with outsiders.

(She clung to Alejandro at first, outsider to outsider. Lone wolf to separated wolf.)

The partitions are up in the auditorium, such gargantuan ravines highlighted by the beams from the window strips on either side of an alcove to Kate’s left. She falls into a chair in the front row, farthest down on the right, can skim her fingers on the rough bricks. Pulls her arms into her lap, wedging them between her thighs, off the armrests pinging her elbows and away from the blue fabric scratching her bare skin. 

Two state police officers fill the chairs next to her, glance her way with the same rigid expression as the others. Chairs squeak as they crane forward too, as they levitate to get their look. Kate presses her lips together. 

Everyone’s staring; she can feel it. At the lone woman, at the person sitting by herself without an agency or partner, not part of the seven or three or four chunking the rows behind her. She doesn’t have the right training, they figure, for a stealth mission or to even be in the same room as men who the American people don’t even know exist. 

Who are ghosts as much as she heard that agent in El Paso greet Alejandro by.

Kate scoops her hair back along her scalp and to the tight bundle pinned at the nape of her neck, wants to dismantle it and loop it again just for something to do with her hands.

Leech parades into the room, laptop tucked under one arm and papers clapping the other knee. “Buenos días,” he calls. The door clangs shut behind him and like his greeting, it vacuums them and swallows them, but does little for the chatter buzzing about the room. 

A gavel pounded into his desk, Leech kicks a folding chair into the wall. Talk famishes under chuckles, heads languish into hands, attention regiments forward. Kate watches the projection screen flap. 

“I hope everyone slept on the plane because you’re sure as shit not gonna get any later.” 

Straight as a crooked arrow, Leech scrutinizes his audience while his laptop hums on the stool. He dispenses the papers accordingly, drops a handful of the packs stamped classified at the end of each row. The last one is thrown at Kate’s chest. 

“What I’ve just given you,” Leech says, sticking his hands in his pockets and plop, plop, plop down the stairs, “are the faces and profiles of everyone from Los Urabeños whose expected to be at the meeting later today. We deploy at thirteen hundred hours, so use the two hours I’m giving you to memorize every face there.”

Scruffy faces, Kate sees, appareled in coats of green and brown, in military fatigues and flannel arms, young, old, colored and manicured until none have distinctive facial characteristics. 

“Now, as I told each of you during your recruitment, this is purely a supervision operation,” Leech clarifies. “Throughout 2012 four jefes from Los Rastrojos were either apprehended by or surrendered to the US DEA. Since then the cartel’s believed to be run by Memo Fantasma, aka Guillermo Camacho Acevedo.” 

His photograph, grainy and black and white and old, blinks onto the screen, lush-haired and upper lip beset by a caterpillar. “Acevedo staged his own disappearance the same year, becoming affectionately known as the ‘narco-ghost,’ one of many invisibles in the drug trade.”

“So he’s a fucking Casper,” the man behind Kate grumbles under his breath, boot digging into the back of her chair. 

“That he is,” Leech agrees. “But, since the Sonora cartel dissolved a year ago, he’s been surfacing. We and the state police have detected him for no more than two to three hours at a time. And in those few hours he’s meeting other capos to persuade them under his umbrella and acquire influence over their business.

“Los Urabeños is the last crayon in the box, so to speak. Acevedo is meeting with its cap, Daniel Rendom Herrera, at three o’clock today. Our objective is to watch his six. If anyone from Herrera’s personal security or anyone he’s contracted tries something we’ll be there in the wings to even the score.”

Watches ping and collude in Kate’s ears, but the rest of her erupts. She burns hot, fire licking down her spine and filling her chest and into her hands, and it wraps her heart in a cocoon this man cannot be serious. None of them can be, so calm and so eager to set their clocks on their wrists to a countdown.

But the screen clicks over to a map, to a slender agora, dotted with shops and vendors selling rugs and jewelry and figurines she sees in the windows for Día de Muertos. And Leech hovers the cursor over it and he is, he’s serious. 

How could she walk into this again?

“The meeting will take place in the apartment above the Polvo Café here,” Leech explains, points and points. “The surrounding marketplace is much smaller than La Alameda which is why we think it was chosen. 

“Our pathfinders have established both Acevedo and Herrera will report to the agreed-upon spot through the west door here. All of you will be stationed in and around the coffee shop and you are not to leave those posts until our placed agent confirms Herrera has agreed to Acevedo’s terms and the deal is legalized.

“During the meeting their security will patrol in abundance so remember not to react to it,” Leech advises. His gaze finds Kate, stares her down until she too nods. She bites her cheek to do so. “This isn’t some backyard meth lab. These wealthy organizations do their business in a city of two million people every day. There is no room for this to spill onto the streets and if you catch the attention of any of these men, that’s exactly what will happen.”

Leech unhooks the laptop from the projector and scrolls through a document pulled to the front screen. It balanced one his forearm, he faces them. “Stand up when I call your name,” he instructs, forehead pinching. 

“Archer, Howe, Mills, and Walsh,” he lists, and up pop those from DEVGRU, “will be our rooftop snipers at one, four, seven, and ten. Sit. Ferguson, Macer, Smith, Strand, and Willard,” and Kate makes it to her feet without tripping, before the others. She inspects the MARSOC three and one Delta member and thinks it’s a pity she doesn’t recognize them. “You five will be our tourists out for a shopping and photography day.” 

“No promises those pictures are gonna be any good,” Willard as identified by his tag comments.

The levity earns him a smile from Leech. “You can spend the whole time taking pictures of Macer’s ass and I wouldn’t give a shit.”

That fire creeps up on Kate again, suffusing her cheeks. Snickers embed in her ears as they flop back down, and she wishes they ignored her like the men from Matt’s team did, without the leering and the sexism and her being the object they’re going to spend the afternoon toying with for a good laugh. Where were the Reggies and Alejandros here?

She pushes her shoulders back as Leech rattles on. “Rodriguez, Silvio, and Soares,” he says, pointing to three more from Delta. “There’s a fútbol match at the same time and the coffee shop will be airing it. You’ll be decked out in your favorite team. Cuarón, Mateo, and I will also be inside, doing business over commercial real estate.

“You will be in civilian clothing and will not carry anything affiliating you with the United States government. If you fuck up or shit hits the fan we will not come back for you. You escape and you evade, and you try your hardest to get your ass back here before the plane takes off.” 

A grin slams onto his face. “Now get out.” 

Kate drums her fingers on the packet, uncrosses and crosses her legs as the room empties, and it’s in her throat, swelling up to her tongue, to shout bastard and son of a bitch and goddamn you. All the sibilant honesty she wanted so badly to spit in Matt’s face before she stocked herself in a room with his morally-corrupt twin.

She stays glued to her chair, room vacated and finally left with Leech, and it squirms her insides how unsurprised he is. He tosses a smile at her under his arm. “What do you want, Macer?” 

“We’re working for Acevedo?” she spews, rattles to her feet with the accusation so suddenly the chair crashes back into its natural fold. “That’s not what I signed up for.”

“You worked with Matt,” Leech reminds her. “Surely this isn’t so shocking a development.” 

“It’s not what I signed up for,” Kate reiterates.

“Of course it is. You wanted on this mission because it had to do with the cartels. Did you think we were conducting a sad little drug bust? Or money laundering?” Leech clicks his laptop shut. “Own up to your decisions, Macer. And make peace with consequences that come with them.” 

Kate crosses her arms over her chest, hears the trueness in the words because she recalls her father saying something of the same. But it still tastes bitter after all these years. Not about consequences, about accepting them or understanding them or making amends. But where she puts herself. Where she’s put herself again. Time and time again. 

She counts the bricks from floor to ceiling. “Who’s the placed agent? You said you have one. And I’m guessing they’re in the meeting. So who is it?”

“That’s classified,” Leech responds. “But it’s not who you think it is.”

“Excuse me?”

“I only accepted your request to be part of this operation on Matt Graver’s recommendation,” he confesses. “Of the many things he told me, he said the last and only time he’s ever worked with you, you stuck close to a Colombian consultant named Alejandro Gillick.” 

Mexican, she corrects. Not Colombian by heritage or upbringing, but by everything lost and nothing left, and why does that matter, she wonders. Why does she care enough to want to say it out loud? 

“He said he observed something between you two that he can’t put his finger on. But he also informed me Mr. Gillick has full immunity with DOD and DOJ, and while he’s not expected to be present today, if he is for some reason, he’s to be released without question or harm coming to him.”

Leech touches toes with her, towers her and intrudes on her, and Kate recognizes it. Alphas cow their packmates into submission, growl and claw and bite to quell retaliation. At least this one hasn’t put her face to the dirt or shined a burn the size of a gun’s barrel under her chin.

This one presses so close she smells the evergreen gum tarred to his teeth.

“So if you’ve entered my operation to achieve some revenge or sense of justice for something that happened on Graver’s task force, take your personal shit and leave it in your fucking rearview mirror. I don’t have room for it. Do you understand me?”

Kate tips her chin up so high she feels her bones snapping. “Then why did you include me?” 

“If Herrera catches wind of our presence, you be damned sure he’ll take any hostages he can get his hands on. Then we’ll need a negotiator.” 

“That’s not what I do,” Kate says.

“You will for me. Because Matt also said you’re loyal to your orders, so don’t disappoint me now.” 

He twists on his heels and strides for the door, smacks his hand into the bar and it sounds like a bullet going off in Kate’s head. Like the two Alejandro put in her chest, jarring her out of the mist of wanting past cloak and daggers and back to doing what she must to survive these men. 

“By the way,” Leech adds, pausing in the jamb, “you wouldn’t be on my op if I didn’t trust you. But you’re a spook, and that makes me suspicious.” 

Kate quells a chuckle. “A spook?”

“You conducted one mission with Delta Force then you vanished—”

“I was at Camp Bullis—”

“Training recruits,” Leech says, “I know. Jennings gave me your file before I decided on you. Like I said, whatever made you run better not have followed you here.”

 

But didn’t he hear?

Ghosts follow her everywhere.

 

Kate doesn’t remember her last vacation. Perhaps it was sometime during her marriage. Definitely not in the last three years. “If I’m a civilian, what do you expect me to wear?” she makes the mistake of asking, has seen those women tan and fresh from Cabo and Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro. 

In less than an hour Leech rolls a menagerie of dresses out in front of her. And, sadly, everyone has an opinion. 

The orange one, Delta wants, picking up its spaghetti strings and ruffling up its flared hem. 

The long one, MARSOC argues, the tactical adventure of a maxi touching her toes though she’ll have to hold it up just to walk. 

The strapless one, Leech suggest, the one that wraps her in a jungle and might parry her pallid complexion.

The mini, they all agree, and Kate thinks no, she’ll pull on it and stretch it and obvious she’s uncomfortable. 

The cream one, she decides, loves its straps thick enough to hide her bra and the scoop neck high enough to hide the wire. She slips it on under bathroom fluorescence, irons it with her hands, down her stomach and over her waist and hips, and hopes she can take it home with her.

 

“Are you, are you, coming to the tree? They strung up a man, they say who murdered three,” Willard sings under his breath in the car, out of the base, through the streets, and to the agora. 

He worms into Kate, needles her to whip around and snap at him in the backseat, but Cali passes through the window, gothic marble churches and a sea of clay shingles and flowers blooming from the streets and commemorative statues on every corner, and their distraction enough for now. Cristo Rey bobs ever on the horizon. 

Strand expertly parallels two blocks away, lassoes Kate by the neck, and the five scuttle through traffic to the park across the street, flowing towards a bronze statue crowded with tourists. Willard’s song downgrades to a hum as they brush shoulders with families and couples and natives just trying to squeeze around the fete. 

Men in sneakers and their shirts blasting the city recline on the statue’s marble dais. Women young and old clamor as they can reach for the perfect selfie. Two pull Kate up, her straw bag hooked on Ferguson’s arm and his hand cupping her foot to boost, and the city sprawls out under her fingertips. 

Leaning on the soldier, she has a perfect vantage of the open-air marketplace long in front of her. Narrower than it looked on screen, the cobblestone lanes are only so wide as to permit foot traffic, too congested then for any car to honk through. Hordes loiter at each open window, filtering necklaces and rug fringe and blouses through their fingers. 

And at the end, Povlo Café, the roads forking at its doorstep, climbing far up a hill. 

Willard steps up on a fountain ledge, camera lens zooming off Kate and on the snipers crawling into place.

 

Acevedo and Herrera have been upstairs for forty-five minutes, each twenty late and barely glancing at the fútbol they passed in front of. Soares and Silvio’s cheers are as boisterous and as gay as the yellow jerseys they snap the collars of. One of Herrera’s guards, denim button down married to boot-cut jeans, peaks through the shop’s open doors 

The SIG P226 in Kate’s bag weighs heavy on her. Every time she retrieves money a strap slips off her arm and flops to the side, and she worries on the bag’s fallibility. An open bag is vulnerable to eyes that could peer in and spy the handgun. 

Guns surely aren’t anything new to South America, but a tourist toting one most certainly is. If any of the crones behind the counters see the gun what’s to stop them from closing up shop early, alerting those gunners and passing the abort to their bosses? 

What’s to stop anyone from thieving it and using it on her?

Ferguson adheres to her side, however, and purchases most anything she wants. For want, all her desire cylinders to one necklace found in the fifth booth; a single strand of silver that’ll rub her skin green, the wreath drips four teardrops emeralds, laying them prettily on her collarbone, the rhinestones framing each one brushing her dress. 

“I bet good money they’re not real,” Ferguson remarks. “This country is known for emeralds, but anything you buy on the streets are probably imitations.” 

Kate shrugs, fingering the delicate drops. “I don’t care.” 

Nothing is as it seems on the outside anyhow. 

Out of the corner of her eye Ferguson smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “When I was growing up, my dad dreamt of owning a distillery. He wanted to make bourbon because his grandfather told him stories of making moonshine during the Depression.”

Kate looks at Ferguson, her own grandfather fluttering to the surface of her mind as he mentioned his, thinks of the ornery man who spun glories of a tenure as a New York cop. Who, displeased with his son’s rotation out of the military into politics, foisted his morals on Kate. 

Most of the time she’s glad he did.

“I was in high school when he finally got the opportunity to make that dream of his real,” Ferguson continues. “He didn’t start making money until I was finishing up college. And the first thing he did was buy my mom a new wedding ring, one inlayed with diamonds just like she always wanted. They were tiny, tiny diamonds, but the look on her face when she put it every morning…it was her treasure. Your expression reminds me of her.”

Kate smiles, pries her lips from it to speak, but static fills her ear. “ALCON, there is movement approaching your door,” Mills reports, and her eyes flit to the rooftop at her one.

“It’s a car,” Leech clarifies softly. 

Ferguson twists his ankle, leans on the wall beside the shop and props his foot, shutter digging into his back. Kate shifts too, drifting down the display and fingers skirting along a bed of rings. The car – Honda, late nineties looks it, painted half gray and half maroon – rolls to a stop under the apartment window, where agora booths give way to houses. A figure fiddles about the cabin.

And then a boy climbs out. Seventeen, if that, tall and lanky and clenched like the backpack hanging on his shoulder weighs as much as the Titanic. He swings the keys into his hands and long hair flushing his eyes from sight, slips into the first house.

“What do you think?” Kate inquires, laying a bracelet on her wrist but flashing her attention at the car, at the door and house and whoever it encapsulated. 

Ferguson shrugs, picks at chip of peeling paint. “Kid coming home from school, maybe.”

“It’s almost July. And all of these houses back up to an alley that runs parallel to the marketplace.”

Kate grins at the woman behind the counter, says, “Muchas gracias,” and twinkles her fingers over the necklace. She threads her arm in Ferguson’s and they troop up the slight incline to the coffee shop, slow to the clap, clap of her sandals. 

“Ferguson, Macer, what are you doing?” Leech hisses in their ears. “Stay in position.”

“He should’ve parked in the alley,” Kate counters, fluffing her waves to her neck. Her steps slow. “Wait.” 

The boy reemerges. His backpack, a boulder strapped to his back moments ago, is gone. He pauses on the front stoop, stares up, up, up to the figures pacing past ruffling curtains. Kicks his feet. And glances at his watch, skipping off the stoop and down the street and around a corner, squeezing in a sliver between two houses.

Kate pulls from Ferguson, wavers after him. “Macer,” Leech warns, “leave it alone.”

He settles perilously, catastrophically in her gut, that boy. The one who parked too close and had a bag but doesn’t now and stopped in for only a moment and is running too fast from something he checked his watch about. 

Leech hisses at her, but Kate diverges, rough between the buildings and scrapes skin off her bare arms, grits her teeth and suctions through. 

Not a sound walks away from the empty alley. 

He’s gone left, Kate theorizes, away from the incoming blitz, the assassination or bomb or poison or whatever he installed. But that feeds right into the crowds running, into the melee. So maybe he went right, up the hill and reverse of the stream, to find an outlook and watch his work like a god spying on his ants.

Left, right, left, right, left –

Right. 

Up the hill and towards the laundry billowing on clothes lines and children hanging their legs between balcony bars and cats lazing around potted plants.

Kate extracts her service pistol, flicks off the safety, and leaves the beach bag leaning on a wall. “Does anyone have eyes on Macer?” Leech demands in her ear. 

Mills confirms, reports, “She’s one street over, passing the target sight.” 

Kate monsters herself forward, onward. Chasing a suspicion Leech’s rusty and poisoned could sever her head for when this thing is all over.

But if she’s right, if –

“Kate.”

 

Wait. 

What was it she dreamed of? 

Rage digging blood between his eyes and on her hands and from the souls he leached from the world? 

Her sorrow signed to a deed he uses to own a piece of her with?

Relief because monsters are real and don’t come from under beds or out of closets but on the chance street to slay them again? 

The sin of thinking such things and wanting such things, and its equal power in becoming a slayer if and when she chooses and not before? 

 

Kate whips around, and Alejandro is so much a blur that she barely sees him.

Then she does, assailed by his clarity even, not a speck of dust in the galaxy like she’d prefer but a mountain paces behind her and unfazed at a gun pointed at him. The pouches under his eyes sag a little more and his hair is longer, but his small eyes dally on her for too long and her weapon is unbalanced by him, and it’s him.

The ghost of Alejandro, Alejandro the ghost, camouflaged in the tan she recognizes from El Paso.

He approaches her quickly and quietly up the incline, and she dances away from his every step, scuff, scuff back. The voices in Kate’s ears are mere whispers, thunder drowning them out and her as she breathes, “Don’t move.” 

“What are you doing?” His eyes finally release her, on the roofs over their heads and the apartment window to his right. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I shouldn’t be here?” Kate echoes, swallows the timber shaking in her nose and eyes and falling in her throat. She wants to scatter while his attention flits elsewhere, can’t leave herself trapped in another house, at another table, under another gun. “Matt said you weren’t supposed to be here.” 

Alejandro snorts, like a bull kicking up dirt. “Matt says many things. A time ago he swore you wouldn’t be permitted on anymore cartel operations. Stop moving before you hurt yourself.” 

You’d like that, Kate thinks. Almost says. He’d love to see her trip on a broken or uprooted granite, she the blunder he remembered her as and was unlucky to stay. 

“You stop,” she instructs, plants her feet and sinks them in cement. “Joke must be on you. Matt recommended me for this. Stay back,” she reiterates.

He doesn’t. Won’t. Cultivates her space as his own no matter the gun she surges forward with, sucks his Adam’s apple down her barrel. “I’ll shoot you,” she promises.

The slightest smile quirks Alejandro’s lips. “If that were true,” he says, “you’d have done it already.”

He sways forward and rests his forehead on the gun’s barrel, kissed between the eyes and collapsed into pleas of yes and do it, do it. Kate grinds her teeth, prints the gun hard into his skin, bruising him, carving him scar for scar, burn for burn. One large hole ringed in residue for the two popped in her chest, just under her bra’s wire and like she was born with them. 

But she won’t. Refuses. And he knows it. 

He makes her an island, this man. His island.

Voices rise up over the buildings. Jumps the roofs and breathes through the tiny cracks like the heavens themselves are gossiping about too many things at once. 

Kate follows, turning to them and letting Alejandro down. He throws his whole body against her, splits her arms apart and crowds her under the eaves of the closest house. His hand cushions the back of her head from viciously bouncing off the wall, the only bit of her that doesn’t collide so roughly, gun alone clattering up and down the alley.

Her instinct is to fight, to hammer her knee into his side and yell for backup, for Ferguson, Leech, Walsh, whoever in immediate response who should hear her struggle over their feed. She pries her hips off the wall, slams her free hand in Alejandro’s face, but he is a vine, arms ensnaring her and legs getting between her. 

He confiscates her gun in one hand, hooks it on his belt, and covers her mouth with the other. “Don’t,” he orders. “They’ll hear you.”

And then he rips the comm from her person.

Crushes the earpiece and microphone under his boot. 

No one comes running (no one knows to).

“Will you be quiet?” he asks of her, and Kate sags against the wall, compliant.

Her hips filling his hands, Alejandro’s stubby fingers tease her dress’ pleated neckline and the shadowed valley it keeps hold of. He traces the hard line of her collarbone, and Kate doesn’t know why she doesn’t swing. He picks up the drops of imitation emeralds, and she pushes past whatever it is clogging her chest. 

“I can buy you real ones,” he murmurs. 

Her breath hitches at his touch, the traitor. Her chest reaches for him, the turncoat. “Why are you at this meeting?” she begs to know, just that, if nothing else.

“I thought you wanted nothing to do with it,” Alejandro counters, has the gall to tease her and mock her. 

And doesn’t he know that’s the lie she’s had to go to confession for. She’s wanted to believe it for so long, tried to fashion it into a rowboat off his island once. But the scraps she collected were flimsy and inconsistent and disintegrated in her hands too fast to tie it all together and risk the waves.

“You always…” Kate tries, swallows to manage, “I don’t, but you always weasel your way back in. You get into everything.”

Alejandro nods and draws along the magnets up her neck and jaw and dimpled chin and lips. He weaves the minefield so expertly, touches each one like he knows her entirely. And maybe he does. 

Maybe holding tight to something or someone inevitably leaves your residue behind with it.

“We ghosts are good at that, aren’t we?” 

Then he’s gone from her, space returned and gun too, and the world drops at her feet. The chance at her world given back to her, and maybe one where he won’t tear her apart again. Alejandro steps away from her, down the street and in full view of any sniper and probably the window that sounds a lot like the deal he made with Matt. 

It’s in Kate to wonder if the deal’s been signed with blood for ink, notarized finally and mission done, but Alejandro shoos her much louder than any thought of hers. Run while you can, he says, I won’t look, I won’t follow, you’re free. 

But. 

Can she staunch her want to be a slayer? Can she dress the blisters from waiting? Can she let him go as easily as he says run?

She stomps down hard on the world at her feet. “Goddamn you,” she rasps, meant for him to hear it, but the words quake out from under her. She repeats it, louder finally, at his retreating back and this must’ve been how Reggie felt talking to her the last year. 

At her, not to her. Because you can’t talk to someone who’s already leaving you.

“You’re a parasite,” she yells, retracts herself from whatever protection he thought he’d supplied her with and going after him, sticking to him still. “You’re a goddamn fucking parasite. Do you hear me, Medellín? Huh?”

Smack, smack, smack. Kate hates the sound of her boots on cobblestone.

“Do you know what I remember most about when we met? You said taking down Alarcón would be like curing a cancer. I hear congratulations are in order, so congratulations, you killed him. You cured your cancer.”

Alejandro doesn’t respond and a part of Kate never expected him to, wants to keep up this incendiary tirade and get him angry enough or frustrated enough that his reaction is kneejerk. She wants explosions out of him. Something to decimate whatever this is once and for all.

She spies her bag up ahead, gradually sinking. Hears the market on the other side, hears footfall and chatter. 

“Now cure me of mine so I can get the fuck out of this badland you’ve led me to and trapped me in. Cure me of you. Because you’re my cancer,” she says and pounds her heart. “You’ve infected me and the worst part is…” 

Her jerks around as she wanted, but assiduously, tilts his head and the wonder in his eyes makes her skin crawl. “The worst part is..?” he repeats hopefully. 

Kate staples her mouth shut, flits to anywhere but him and the answer and…

A man creeps up behind Alejandro. Away from the coffee shop and peeks of the soccer match, he slithered through the same crack she had, one of Herrera’s come to investigate the scene of which he’s fortunately found. 

A sicario and a US agent. What a prize. The avenue for the respect all men crave is a bullet through each of their hearts.

Blurred behind the M16 he fits his fingers to, Kate realizes his barrel lists a little too far to the left to be aimed at her. She cups her gun in hand, readies a finger on the trigger and snaps her elbows straight. Alejandro’s brows pinch together, didn’t hear the man’s approach and doesn’t know someone’s shined a target in his back.

(She should’ve been quieter.)

The man’s throat sprays to pieces, bullet pulverizes through blood and muscle and bone and splatters him across a dozen stones. 

He chokes on the deluge spilling out, over the hand he clasps to it. His boulders for knees give out, boom to the ground, and the blood siphoned from his robust belly drenches his shirt front and the hard steel of the gun slung across his chest. 

The gun he’s probably killed many with. The gun he would’ve killed with her. The gun he would’ve killed Alejandro with. 

It should make Kate feel justified for shooting him. Or feel anything at all.

The land of wolves is kill or be killed, right?

“Is this what it’s like when you kill someone?” she inquires of Alejandro, both staring at the man and listening to a scuttle scared by a gunshot somewhere around them. Such a thunderclap rolls for miles, after all. “Am I supposed to feel this empty?”

Alejandro turns an astonished eye to her. 

“You were wrong before,” she says. “I was born surrounded by wolves. That’s why I made it my job to protect the sheep from—”

Then the world splinters behind her.

 

When she was eleven Kate set the kitchen microwave on fire.

She dropped a jar of peanut butter on the plate she watched as a kid, tapped in thirty seconds and leaned over to watch it some more. 

Naïve girl, copied what her mom did to cope with campaign grime, warm pint of ice cream in hand and a napkin bib in her neckline, careful as not to drip on a gown she’d return in the morning.

Poor girl, didn’t see the glint of foil not quite stripped from the rim. 

She remembers the booms, sonic and supernova and blasting her past the speed of light. She remembers a ringing heavier than her _fire_ and _help_ and _somebody_ screams, its wild panic stampeding her chest. She remembers no one came. In the whole house, no one came.

 

Cali hasn’t stopped screaming. But everyone comes running. 

 

Someone trips over Kate’s feet, and she wakes, blinking furiously and fog sticking to her eyelashes.

No. 

Ash.

Chalky and thick and gray ash. Building and plant and dirt and human ash.

It seeps through Kate’s lips and she chokes on it, coughs and coughs until her eyes sting and throat burns ragged. Tears leak hot down her cold cheeks, and she can’t breathe, gasps and gulps and lurches off the wall someone leaned her against. 

Smoke contaminates the air and its ash squirms alive in her throat, rages into her chest and sickens her belly. She retches off to the side, chunks splashing on her hand. She trembles and the world seems to as well, flashes of tan skin and red lights and blue swirls and gray whips whirling around her. Across the alley a girl wilts in her brother’s arms, whimpering for their mother. 

Kate staggers to her feet, a steady hand grasping the wall, nothing broken or fractured, all fingers and toes attached, and doubles over. Road rash skins both her arms and hiking up her dress, she uncovers more on her legs, dress brushed in dirt and soot.

Something white catches in the corner of her eye.

A linen handkerchief, wrapped around her left bicep and blooming red. Unknotting the cloth and stocking the laceration mottling her skin, she presses it under her nose, would rather smell blood’s rich copper than fetid puke or charred skin.

“Señora,” the boy calls, cautions up to her and the bloody cloth she drops to her side. “Señora, estás herida?”

Groaning, Kate folds the handkerchief and flips an A.M., monogrammed in one corner, into her palm. Alejandro, her mind supplies at once. Her head pangs at her as she whips back and forth, clocking up and down the street for him, any semblance that he was or that he stayed. 

Did he stay? She can’t remember. She sees an image of him fuzzing at the edges and thinks he did, thinks he carried her out of the blast zone before she decayed anymore, must’ve dressed the cut on her arm and told someone where she was. Maybe. Hopefully. 

Where was anyone else? Ferguson, Leech, even Willard?

Was Leech serious? Did they actually leave her?

“Esto es tuyo?” the boy asks, and holds up her bag, its weave slightly singed but spared for the most part. 

Kate nods, beckons for the bag with twinkling fingers he looks at so skeptically she decides he give it to her at all. Then he does, stretching instead of stepping up to her, almost like he’s afraid. Maybe he is. Maybe the explosion rattled him. Maybe he found the gun.

Dropping Alejandro’s handkerchief to the bottom, Kate scavenges through its contents, taking an inventory of what’s not been pillaged and what’s left. Wallet, identification badge, and passport, only her gun missing.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Sucking a breath between her breath, Kate shakes her hair out. “Qué pasó?” she manages.

“Bomba,” the boy answers solemnly. 

 

A VBIED, to be exact, stationed on the west side of Polvo Café at 4:13PM and detonated at 4:28PM. 

Immediately followed by a pressure cooker device concealed in a backpack, hidden inside a nearby residence at 4:14PM and detonated at 4:29PM.

“You were right about the boy,” Leech admits, and it’s the first thing he’s said to Kate since she caught the jet purring on the runway, almost up, up, and away. 

He looks around the cabin, and Kate sees how much it pains him, not only to admit his fault in not taking her seriously but as a consequence flying alone in a mostly empty cabin without anyone they arrived with. Delta stayed with Delta, DEVGRU with DEVGRU, MARSOC with MARSOC, maimed, beaten, and burned. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Kate bemoans, stares at the images and footage and reporters as close to the blast site as they could finagle on an impossibly small screen. “I didn’t save anyone.”

Not the boy and his sister’s mother, a waitress pouring Silvio more coffee and tsking over his shoulder as Falcao missed a goal. 

Not Silvio, one leg short when he wakes up in the hospital. 

Not Ferguson, who was rushed into an ambulance with Willard holding his arm by a thread. 

Not Walsh, whose funeral Kate won’t be allowed to attend.

 

Strangely, she doesn’t regret it. Not what she did or what she said.

Maybe nobody does when they’ve survived.

 

Kate expires a pack of Indian Creek Reds in front of the television. Grinding the footboard railing under her toes, she sucks down the smoke, warm and hazy on her tongue, to forget the ash full in her lungs. 

It doesn’t work, though. The doing to forget. The distracting to not think. The sleeping and smoking and screening calls and counting the popcorn on her ceiling to not deal. The bombing blankets every station, and she watches again and again, as often and as much as she has to for guilt and regret to reveal the battlefield under her skin.

Because no one mentions a couple kingpins. No one mentions drug cartels or US involvement and how she saw it, could’ve stopped it. There is predilection in both; peace is made from a world pulling together over borders and treaties and arguments to aid survival, but such ignorance stirs an unending tempest in her mind.

She needs someone to blame her so she can start blaming herself.

The sun sinks, and Kate runs out of smokes. The first swipe of color bleeds, and she gives up on sleep, lies on peeling carpet and fills her vision with a sunset’s majesty. Doesn’t move until leftover July 4th fireworks pop in the sky.

Gold limbs of old willow trees and green stars and explosions like the Death Star sparkle and remind her of home, of chasing the other kids on the White House’s South Lawn. East Capital and Eastern Market and Pavilion Café accost her, and she thinks of absconding to Old Town Alexandria with her mom and Politics & Prose with her dad, and in a minute she finds herself pacing the living room with a phone dialing home. 

She lifts bricks to walk. Forces those bricks on her feet from kitchen to balcony, carries around stones strapped to her legs and buckets on her arms. It’s not nearly as agonizing as the trilling, drops it from her ear and has her thumb on End when the other line clicks and Bridget Macer asks her name.

“Mommy,” Kate whispers, cuts her thumb nail on her teeth and repeats it into the receiver.

“Kate,” her mom breathes, sagging in relief. “It’s awfully late, sweetheart. Why are you calling? Are you okay?”

Kate nods, to herself because she’s the one who needs it direly. “Yeah, I just…wanted to hear your voice. I thought I’d get your voicemail. Why are you still up?”

“Your dad and I are heading home from John and Karen’s fortieth wedding anniversary party,” Bridget explains, and Kate pictures her perfectly, wrap balled up in her lap, hair tossed off her neck, divested of shoes and toes digging into the mat. 

“It’s almost one in the morning there.”

“You know John and Karen.” She did, fed John many a times when he and her father were locked in his office writing speeches and preparing conferences and in general wearing Do Not Disturb signs. “They’re New Yorkers born and raised. They never sleep.” 

Kate wonders, “Was the party still going?”

“Of course. How are you, Katie? You said you wanted to talk?” Bridget says, then softer to the side, “Martin, do you want to say hi to Katie? Why don’t you want to talk to your daughter?”

“No, Mom, that’s okay,” Kate hurries, cheeks flaming red and pacing hopping a step. She cups the back of her neck, rubs the scar from falling out of a tree as a kid and bites her lip as its pain flares and perishes. “I have vacation time stacked up and I was wondering if I could come home for a few days.”

Bridget chuckles. “You don’t need to ask permission.” 

“I know I don’t,” Kate mumbles, and no, she doesn’t, not really. 

She hasn’t been home since her and Evan’s divorce three years ago, its idea only briefly pausing her a year ago. It’s time, she thinks. Phoenix has already made her an acquaintance of frustrations and while her father is no less irritating or the city corrupted, maybe she can forget about Alejandro and bombs and orphaned children and her government fostering cartels for good. 

Or at least try.

“But, you know, with Dad sometimes,” she continues. “I don’t want to inconvenience him or you if you already have plans.”

Silence meets her at the end. Deadens what little confidence she built up in asking for home and the supposedly safe cocoon of D.C. “Katie,” her mom says, so slowly, so nervous Kate closes her eyes and chides herself for being weak enough to run to her mommy. “Are you okay? Did something happen at work?”

The government fostering cartels and orphaned children and bombs and Alejandro, those things she knows better than to be anything but lazy when she talks about them. Especially him. Specifically him.

She sits at her little breakfast table and tilts her head back, crawls her feet up the wall. “I’m fine, Mom,” she says and makes it convincing, makes it true if only for the span of a single phone call. “I have vacation time stacked up and I miss you and Dad.” 

“We miss you too, Katie,” Bridget coos. “How long are you thinking about staying?”

“I don’t know,” Kate answers already. Nothing round-trip. However long Jennings is willing to spare her, she supposes.

Someone knocks on her door, steady yet tentative. Thump. Thump. Thump. Inclined towards knocking absolutely, but cagey where it comes to the hour. Like they’re not expecting her to be awake and therefore not expecting her to answer.

“Mom, there’s someone at my door. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? I’ll try to get an afternoon flight out.” 

They oblige their goodbyes as Kate wobbles to the door, considers not answering it at all, considers switching off all her lights so it disappears under the door and waiting until footsteps retire down the hall. 

They’re not moving, however, too tall for the peep hole even as they shift and turn to look down the hall. Kate squints at the black shirt – nondescript, nothing graphic or written, plain and cotton and pulled over with a jacket. She rules out Jennings for never once wearing black. Crosses through Matt because he doesn’t care to know where she lives. Same with Leech. If it were Reggie his neck would be visible. 

This is…she doesn’t know.

Gun concealed behind her back, cold steel she knows so well and is calmed safe by, she puts her hand to the knob and counts to ten. Ten and whoever it is will be gone. Ten and empty space will greet her. Ten and the blinds may be shut and she may be a universe away from yesterday, but the universe is too big to be left out. 

Too big to not salivate at her doorstep because any moment the door will open and the ghosts will come crawling in, consuming her.

The man on her other side, he can swallow her whole.

“You call me a parasite?”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr [here](http://serendipitous--.tumblr.com/) and [here](http://thejennifermathis.tumblr.com/)


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